Movietime January 24 2013

This week on Movietime Summer an interview with 'the mother of the French new Wave', Agnes Varda. The interview was recorded in 2001, just after the release of her marvellous documentary The Gleaners and I, a film about the tradition of gleaning crops after the harvest, and the legal rights of the gleaners. It is also about urban gleaners who scavenge food at urban markets, and goods discarded on the streets in a society built on waste. We meet them as philosophers, not as victims, and a wonderfully wide and eccentric range of people they are. Beyond this, the film is about how art is made, about artists as gleaners, collecting and refashioning images and ideas. And finally, it is about Agnes Varda herself, then in her mid-seventies: in fact Varda’s film starts with the Millet painting of the gleaners and at one stage she very cheekily turns the camera on herself, clutching a sheaf of wheat. Varda has called the film 'Agnes in the year 2000', and it's also about time passing, and her own ageing. She actually does this gallant thing and focuses her little digital camera on her own hand, the wrinkles, the blotches -- and in another sequence where she runs a comb through her hair, she shows the grey near the part, where the red dye grows out. She spoke to Julie on the line from Paris.

Credits

Comments (1)

Rodney Wetherell :

26 Jan 2013 3:38:29pm

It was a sad day when the last Movie Time was broadcast. Julie Rigg has been heard on ABC Radio for a long time - but I remember when she was a regular writer, perhaps a staff member, of The Australian, before this became such a conservative newspaper. Julie has done a splendid job keeping listeners up to date with the movie scene, doing reviews, and interviewing many fine directors and other film people. Thank you for all you have done for us via radio.